1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates, in general, to the field of medication dispensing systems and methods. More specifically, the present invention is directed to systems and methods for rapidly removing solid pharmaceutical medications and nutraceuticals from blister packages.
2. Description of the Related Art
The present invention overcomes the shortcomings and the deficiencies of the prior art systems and methods for removing solid pharmaceuticals from blister packages and is directed to systems and methods which substantially increase the number of blister packages which may be emptied in a given amount of time.
Over the last few years in the field of drug therapy, there has been an increase in the number of treatments that utilize more then one pharmaceutical product to treat any particular ailment. Moreover, as the world population ages, more patients are taking a plurality of medications on a daily basis to treat multiple ailments or diseases. In response, various forms of packaging have been developed in order to organize the medications by time of day and/or day of the week in order to ensure that the proper doses of medication are taken at the correct time of day.
In most instances, an individual receives one or more prescriptions from a doctor, and a pharmacy provides a pre-determined supply of each medication properly distributed amongst cavities of a single container, sometimes called a custom pharmaceutical package. Each cavity in the container or package is labeled for a different day or time of day to ensure that the patient takes the proper medication and dosage throughout the time period prescribed by the doctor. Thus, when an individual is required to take numerous pharmaceutical products throughout a given day the individual simply accesses the proper individual cavity to retrieve the correct dose of medication(s).
As an example of such a package, a container is divided in both the x and y direction into a plurality of individual cavities. The labels in the x direction are, for example, the days of the week: “Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday,” etc. The labels in the y direction are, for example, “Morning, Afternoon, Evening, Bedtime,” etc.
In order to assist pharmacies in filling these packages, automated systems have been developed that disperse individual doses from a bulk supply into respective containers.
However, a problem has arisen in countries such as the United Kingdom which require all medications to be sold and distributed in individual blister packages. As a result, it has not been possible to utilize such automatic packaging devices without first manually removing each medication from the blister pack to form a bulk supply. Such a shortcoming reduces the usefulness of the apparatus and detrimentally causes reduced sales of the devices in these regions. Accordingly, there remains a need in the field for improved pharmaceutical dispensing devices that directly transfer medication doses from a blister pack into a cavity of a custom pharmaceutical package in accordance with a particular patient's needs.
One prior solution is described in earlier filed published United States patent application number 2006/0277870 which is incorporated herein by reference. This application describes an earlier technique in which individual blister packages were emptied through the use of a plunger mechanism which mechanically pushed against the blister cavity to eject the solid pharmaceutical product. One shortcoming and deficiency of this prior approach is the limited throughput achieved by this mechanism. In this prior approach, the system operator was only able to eject the solid product or products from a single blister package cavity at any given time. Although this approach improved over the prior art, greater processing speeds are still desired. Accordingly, there remains a need for new and improved systems and methods which are able to achieve greater throughput by more quickly ejecting solid pharmaceutical and nutraceutical products from blister package cavities.
Other objects and advantages of the present invention will be apparent in light of the following Summary and detailed description of presently preferred embodiments.